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Comment by samfisher83 | Hacker News Reader

Given the dod budget is bigger than the revenue of google, amzn, and msft combined and with a million employees why can't they just build their own data centers?

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This was surprising to me, but in retrospect not that surprising

    - AMZN 2019: 280.5B
    - GOOG 2019: 160.7B
    - MSFT 2019: 125.8B
    total:       567.0B
         
    - DoD  2019: 686.1B

I think DoD spents a larger portion of its budget on aircraft carriers, while those other orgs spend a lot more on managing data center

Probably the same reason they don’t build factories and bring airplane and tank production in house.

The DOD is typically not able to pay market rates, and for various reasons isn't always the best organization when it comes to project management

The point isn't the data centers. The DoD has data centers, and could build more.

The point is taking advantage of cloud-native technology to gain an edge. You can throw all the servers in the universe together, and it won't give you out-of-the-box AI or ML toolkits, or hosted Kubernetes solutions.

The point is leveraging the expertise that GCP/AWS/Azure have already poured into the cloud. There are a lot of people who reasonably complain about the cost of AWS, but there are no (reasonable) people that argue that that cost (of one of the big 3 cloud providers, whichever) doesn't equate to the highest-leverage solution on the market. And if the DoD is anything... it is not price-sensitive.

AWS -> Google Cloud

Google won the contract, not Amazon.

Because the data center operation isn’t the big problem for enterprises like DoD anymore, it’s the completely fragmented software environment they’ve struggled for decades to manage. VMware decades ago won a massive deal with DoD not for consolidating datacenters like most private sector was trying to do but to simply standardize machines to deploy.

Because those companies already hired too many of the best engineers?

I don’t mean that to be flippant. I’m under the impression that these orgs hire to some extent with the intention to make a scarce resource less available to others. Seems like a tough bidding war for the DOD to enter.

The government has salary caps for employees which means that they pay significantly less versus the private sector for things like top end engineers.

How much of this budget is left for the data centers?

That's capex. Snark aside, everyone has to save capex into things no one else does. Opex for things other people do.

Adding to the other answers the fact that there is a thing called "Military-Industrial Complex".

There arent enough jobs in building datacenters.

Technical expertise ?

Faster and cheaper.

If I had to guess, it is because the working culture of public organizations (often a lack of motivation/incentive due to lack of competition), combined with tenure-based job security, and artificial constraints (pay structures/levels that don't align with the competitive market) mean that someone like the DoD can't really get something like this done. They wouldn't be able to hire the right talent. If they did hire talent, that talent would need to work in the shadow of existing hierarchies/authorities that aren't suited for the role. Not to mention that bidding processes like LPTA (Lowest Price Technically Acceptable) would hinder procurement with a lot of red tape and poor decision making.

TLDR, because they aren't set up for success like private organizations.

I would guess it's less likely to be this, and more likely to be purchasing rules in place that ask them to by default place bids for private organizations to carry out work to meet specifications, and only bring it in-house under exceptional cases or where the bids are very uncompetitive.

These rules often exist as a means of ensuring fairness, as an anti-corruption measure, or to provide enough business to maintain a robust network of private contractors.

Or, you know, it's pretty expensive to run the aircraft carriers and army that ensure the safety of the worlds richest nation using the worlds strongest army in history.

According to Chomsky, the pentagon system is a way for the state to coordinate a privately owned economy. The purpose of the system is to coordinate technological development while handing money to private interests.

http://thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/PentagonSystem_Chom.ht...

Because bribes won't give themselves. Obvious sarcasm, but there's a reason why the government really sucks at accomplishing anything technically elaborate: they simply don't care if it's any good, nor do they care how much it costs or how long it takes. It's not their money or their property. If it does well, nobody will see an extra dime. If it sucks, nobody will get fired. That's how you get $5K screwdrivers and $30K toilet seats, and half a million dollar aircraft carrier toilet flushes.

> That's how you get $5K screwdrivers and $30K toilet seats, and half a million dollar aircraft carrier toilet flushes.

A bit off topic: what are these? Mind providing more details or sources?

https://www.navytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2020/03/...

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